Automated Organoid Screening Platform For Drug Discovery and Precision Medicine

Cel

The project addresses Challenge 2 of the European Innovation Council Advanced Innovation Challenges Pilot by advancing a disruptive New Approach Methodology (NAM) platform designed to accelerate cancer drug development while reducing reliance on exploratory animal experimentation.
OKOMERA’s Ocentra platform is a compact, automated benchtop system integrating rapid 48-hour three-dimensional organoid generation from minute patient-derived tumor samples with automated microfluidic standardization and AI-driven analytics in a single industrial workflow. Unlike existing organoid platforms relying on manual multiwell expansion and fragmented processes, Ocentra enables standardized, miniaturized, and traceable generation of uniform tumor microtissues. This directly addresses a major barrier to NAM adoption: the lack of reproducible and transferable systems compatible with pharmaceutical R&D environments.
The prototype has been validated in-house using multiple patient-derived tumor models, demonstrating reliable automated 3D culture formation and reproducible compound exposure suitable for target validation and quantitative dose-response profiling.
The EIC AIC Stage 1 project will conduct the first independent validation of the prototype in an external pharmaceutical research laboratory to assess robustness, reproducibility and operational feasibility outside the developer’s facilities. In parallel, the project will implement a robust data governance framework ensuring traceability and regulatory-aligned handling of patient-derived biological materials, and define a Stage 2 transition strategy including a regulatory and commercial adoption roadmap and formalized commitments from industrial and clinical partners to support continued validation and pilot activities.